Get Email Updates

The Dispatch E-Edition

All current subscribers have full access to Digital D, which includes the E-Edition and
unlimited premium content on Dispatch.com, BuckeyeXtra.com, BlueJacketsXtra.com and
DispatchPolitics.com.
Subscribe
today!

It's a guide to improving Columbus' economy and creating a dynamic and inspirational urban
heart.

It calls for more parks for children and parkways to link neighborhoods, as well as more public
art and an effort to beautify the Scioto River's banks.

It's a comprehensive plan to rebuild the central city.

It's also 100 years old.

The 1908 "City Beautiful" plan discusses many ideas that planners, civic leaders and residents
are talking about now to make Columbus more livable: bikeways, Scioto Mile park, more green space,
more public art.

"Many of the issues discussed in the plan 100 years ago are issues that remain topics of
discussion today," Kathy Mast Kane, executive director of the Columbus Landmarks Foundation, said
in an e-mail.

The foundation helped create a small, three-panel exhibit of the 1908 plan - now in the lobby of
City Hall - that it wants to expand and display at other locations through the end of the year.

It also is working with the Columbus Metropolitan Club on a forum Sept. 24 at the Columbus
Athletic Club Downtown to discuss what can be learned from the plan, Kane said.

"It is also our hope that learning about the 1908 plan, and the visionaries who authored it,
will inspire forward thinking by our leadership and the public at large today," she said.

The 1908 vision sprang from a less ambitious idea. In 1904, then-Mayor Robert H. Jeffrey
appointed a committee to look into creating a better park system.

At the time, America's cities were exploding with growth, thanks to industrialization. People
moved from farms to cities to find work. Immigrants, many of them from Eastern and southern Europe,
filled central-city neighborhoods.

This led to crowded, dirty cities plagued by inadequate sanitary-sewer systems and lacking in
clean water.

Business leaders pressed for better public services. The introduction of the study mentions the
"humiliating position" Columbus found itself in because of the lack of parks and playgrounds.

At the same time, a "City Beautiful" movement was sweeping the country. The new, classically
inspired buildings hosting exhibits at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago had
provided a vision of what America's cities could become.

"Leadership wanted to re-create their cities," said Columbus' planning administrator, Vince
Papsidero. "The Chicago world's fair created a new vision of what America should be."

The result was a civic-center plan that envisioned a mall linking the Statehouse with an armory
on the Scioto's west bank. A post office, an art museum, an auditorium and a state building would
be clustered around a new City Hall between S. 3rd and 4th streets south of E. Broad.

"What was put out to the public was an image of the future," said Laurence Gerckens, a retired
Ohio State University professor of city and regional planning.

The idea was to create a public realm "where it doesn't matter how rich and poor you are," said
Jeff Darbee, a historic-preservation consultant. Everyone would be welcome.

"People would be inspired by beautiful settings to live higher-quality lives," he said.

The plan also suggested burying utility lines, building public restrooms underground (for a
sense of privacy) and separating storm sewers and sanitary sewers.

A century later, Columbus is spending $2.5 billion to upgrade its sewer system, including
separating old storm and sanitary sewers.

The 1908 plan was never completely implemented. Darbee said there was a lot of political
pressure against it.

The
Dispatch called it highly artistic and elaborate. "The immense cost, however, and the many
practical impediments along the way, will prevent their being carried out in anything like their
entirety," an editorial predicted.

The plan ultimately led to a number of public buildings, including City Hall, the federal
courthouse, the Ohio Supreme Court building, Veterans Memorial and old Central High School, which
now is part of the COSI Columbus science museum.

Downtown could have looked a lot different.

"It would have been nice if we would have done a lot of things," Gerckens said.